Samsung and SK Hynix reveal $590 billion DRAM expansion plan

Four days after a U.S. lawsuit accused them of deliberately limiting memory supply, Samsung and SK Hynix joined the South Korean government to disclose plans for an investment worth around $590 billion that would double national DRAM output within five years.

The lawsuit accuses the three dominant DRAM makers of restricting supply. Seventeen American plaintiffs, including individuals and small retailers, filed the complaint on June 25 in a California federal court. The filing targets Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, which together hold nearly 90% of the global DRAM market, claiming they coordinated output cuts that allegedly pushed standard memory prices up around 700% across four years.

This marks another encounter with American justice for the industry. In 2005, Samsung and SK Hynix pleaded guilty to fixing DRAM prices during the early 2000s, resulting in fines of $300 million and $185 million respectively plus prison terms for some executives. Micron escaped penalties after assisting investigators.

The investment plan includes four new factories. The program announced on June 29 calls for construction of four additional plants and a doubling of South Korea's DRAM capacity, according to Seoul.

Those facilities will not open until the mid-2030s. A portion of the new output will target HBM, the high-margin stacked memory that powers Nvidia's AI accelerators. Since 2022, around a quarter of production capacity is said to have already shifted to HBM, and each HBM die reportedly occupies twice the silicon area of a conventional DDR module.

Analysts see continued price pressure through 2028. Jefferies expects DRAM prices to climb 40 to 50% in the third quarter of 2026 and another 30 to 40% in the fourth, with no easing until 2028.

The expansion therefore offers little immediate help for PC builders or smartphone buyers. Even on paper, doubling total capacity will not translate into twice as many standard memory sticks because of the ongoing pivot toward AI-focused HBM. Cloud providers locking in multi-year reservations keep receiving priority over consumer orders.

The timing suggests an image-management response. The rapid sequence of a collusion complaint followed by the industry's biggest-ever capacity pledge appears designed to counter allegations of artificial scarcity. Yet the distant timeline and redirection of output toward higher-value AI memory mean the Korean announcement primarily reassures investors and polishes corporate reputations rather than easing near-term consumer costs.